Patients stranded in hospitals in Nairobi as NHIF systems collapse

Patients at the Kenyatta National Hospital and other health facilities around Nairobi have for the last two days been stranded in hospital facilities following a major system outage in the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) systems.

Health facilities have not been able to access payment services to NHIF since Friday evening after a faulty power transformer caused the collapse of the systems.

“We would like to inform our members that due to unavoidable and unforeseen circumstances, the power supply system at NHIF building suffered a critical fault occasioned by a faulty transformer which is affecting the delivery of various services to our members,” the parastatal said in a statement.

NHIF said that technical teams were working to fix the problem but as of Saturday afternoon, services were yet to be restored. Most of the affected were discharged patients seeking to pay for services using their NHIF cards. 

It is still unclear how long it will take for the agency to fix the problems. Many Kenyans have taken to social media to protest over the outage and possible penalties likely to be charged for late payments due to the system outage.